Taunt (warrior ability)

Taunt is a single target warrior ability which forces the mob to attack the warrior for 3 seconds. Taunt is instant-cast, does not trigger the global cooldown, costs no Rage and has an 8 second cooldown.

Some mobs (most bosses in particular) are immune to taunt. Taunt can be resisted, and cannot be used when silenced. Taunt has no effect on enemy players in PvP (although it can be used on players' pets) and does not have any effect when the warrior already has aggro on the mob, except that the mob will be forced to target the warrior for 3 seconds.

Taunt is one of the signature moves of a tanking warrior. It may help aggro buildup greatly, and it may be a life-saver in certain situations. On the other side it has a rather long cooldown, so it must be used with care and a good grasp of the overall situation (in multi-mob pulls in particular). It should also be well understood that after 3 seconds, the mob may immediately turn to another target, if the tanks aggro buildup was lower than that of the other player(s).

A melee damage dealer has 1000 points of threat on a mob. A warrior taunts the mob, thereby immediately gaining a threat value of 1000, and forcing the mob to attack the warrior for three seconds. After that time, threat works normally for the mob, and if no one is at 130%/110% (ranged/melee) of the tank's threat, the warrior remains the mob's target.

• Example:

Normally, hunters can help a tanks initial aggro buildup with Misdirection. If that's on cooldown, it's possible to use a combination of Taunt and Feign Death to achieve the same effect. The hunter pulls, using their most aggro intensive abilities. When the mob is about to hit the hunter, the warrior Taunts and the hunter Feigns Death. Misdirection is the safer method though, as both the Taunt and Feign Death can be resisted by the mob.

• Pulling:

As of patch 4.0.1, Taunt cannot miss. Prior to this, it had a 17% chance to miss raid bosses (in contrast to the 8% chance to miss boss mobs for melee attacks). So even if you were melee hit capped (263 hit rating at level 80), Taunt's chance to miss was still 7%. This gap was covered with Glyph of Taunt.

Previously, Warriors learned Taunt from the Defensive Stance quest at level 10.

• Taunt is an Uncommon Warrior ability card in the World of Warcraft: Trading Card Game's Drums of War and Class Starter 2010 sets.
• Taunt is one of 's Heroic abilities in Heroes of the Storm. It forces an enemy player to attack Varian for a short time. It also uses the same distinctive sound effect as the World of Warcraft ability.

• Vanilla WoW: on release, Taunt did not create extra aggro for the warrior, it only forced the mob to attack the warrior for 3 seconds.